Arrangement

Once upon a time in 1997, there was a Nintendo 64 game developed by Treasure by the name of Mischief Makers. It was a cute side-scrolling platformer/shmup where you play a robotic maid and go on an adventure to save your creator from a bad guy. While the game was a bit obscure and only received mixed reviews at the time, it still has a niche fandom that remembers it fondly.

Enter Materia Collective, who decided they’d release little EP for the game featuring the likes of EDM artists James Landino, Voia, Ben Briggs, Baircave, and a guest appearance by Hyper Potions in order to create a arranged tribute to the game called Mischief MakersRemixed. The EP features five tracks of electronic dance arrangements of the music originally composed by Norio Hanzawa (of Gunstar Heroes fame under the alias NON), and is entirely produced by indie composer and arranger James Landino.

“When I was young, Mischief Makers was one of the titles I continued to rent from the video rental store and I grew a nostalgic fondness for it. To my surprise, many fans have reached out to me and requested the possibility of remixing the soundtrack to this game.

Nowadays the game industry is seeing a resurgence of cult classics and hidden gems being remastered. It would be awesome for a developer or publisher to consider remaking Mischief Makers for the current generation of consoles” – James Landino, Producer

Mischief Makers Remixed is a fully licensed album and can be purchased and downloaded digitally on Bandcamp for the tidy sum of $5.

It’s always a fun little treat when you come across a band or musician who normally does their own thing with original music in their own style, but then suddenly breaks out a video game cover. (I’m looking at you, Mutoid Man) It’s like getting a neat little surprise in your cereal box.

Jazz musician Reuben Gingrich recently released his first album, Blue Island, which features 11 tracks of what his Bandcamp describes as “Space Funk to the Dome”. It’s all enjoyable stuff to listen to for some chill tunes so you should check it out on its own merits, but nestled in the middle of the album is delightful tribute to Chrono Trigger‘s “Secret of the Forest”.

The original song, composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, is the theme of the Guardia Forest from the Chrono Trigger Original Soundtrack. The song and video production done by Gingrich are both top notch and worth the attention. You can check out the entire Blue Island album on Bandcamp and Spotify.

What hidden gems of video game music have you found buried within seemingly innocuous original music albums before? Share them with us in the comments!

Coming off of Patient Corgi’s mega collaboration, Tribute Album 64, Vancouver’s video game medley band, The Runaway Four, have announced the release of their first studio album on January 20th. Titled Chaos Theatre the 45 minute album offers five tracks of themed medleys with tunes from 31 different games mingling and mixing together.

In the opening track “This Game is Baroquen”, you’ll hear Final Fantasy, ActRaiser, Super Mario RPG, Columns and Katamari beautifully intertwined and played in a classical baroque style. The next three medleys are themed around the video game tropes of Ice Worlds, Fire Worlds and Battle Themes.

In “Borreal Bedlam” Earthbound flows into Donkey Kong Country into Kirby’s Dream Course among 8 other themes. On “Magma Mayhem” you’ll hear Diddy Kong Racing mingle into Super Mario RPG and charge into “Hot Damned” from Super Meat Boy. “Battle Royale” is a 17-minute track that melds 15 different battle themes from games including Chrono Cross, Bahamut Lagoon, Kirby Super Star, Pokemon R/B/Y and even Mega Man. Finally, there’s “Your Sanctuary”, a medley of themes from Earthbound which the band describes as “the warm hug at the end of the journey”.

Chaos Theatre will be released January 20th on The Runaway Four’s Bandcamp page and kicked off with a live show and listening party at Seven Dining Lounge in Vancouver. For those not on the continent or in the area they’ll also be streaming the event live on their Twitch channel. In the meantime, check out some of The Runaway Four’s past performances on YouTube and their previous release Live at Columbia Theatre on Bandcamp.

You may have caught some links to Luminist’s analog synth remake of the original Metroid soundtrack in October when he began releasing single tracks. I was also going to share the work-in-progress but decided to wait for it to be completed, and now it is. Capping off the year is the full 12-track album which you can listen to (and watch) on Luminist’s YouTube playlist or download for $5 on Loudr.

“My initial interest behind doing this was thinking that if the technology were available back then to put hi-fi recordings into a videogame, they might have done it this way with Metroid,” Luminist told Kill Screen. “I’m just interested in bringing out more of the inherent alone-in-space factor that the original gave us with bleeps and bloops.”

The entire album is just over 15 minutes in length but it’s definitely worthy of playing on repeat. Luminist nailed it on adding to the “alone-in-space factor” with the despondent synths and thrumming bass. Take a listen above and let us know what you think of this fresh new (and old) sound in the comments.

For all you Overwatch fans, the good people over at Gamechops have released a new remix of music from the game. The single “The World Could Always Use More Heroes“, created by Curly, mastered by Steven “bLiNd” Silo and master by DJ Cutman, also comes with a special extra music video with animations from PlayOverwatch.

As always you can find more remixes (including future Overwatch arrangements) over on the Gamechops Youtube page.

A few weeks ago, Shaun posed the question of what the very first game soundtrack album you ever heard was. This got me thinking of my own past dealing with video game music and getting into “the scene”, as it were. I started thinking about the first time I started looking up game music on the internet (circa 1999-ish?), which lead to my eventual discovery of video game music *remixes*. While arranging game music had been something people had been doing for a a while prior to the internet really gaining traction, sites like Overclocked Remix & VGMix became the centralized places for potential arrangers to congregate and show off their works by the early 2000’s. The scene grew to the point musicians were challenging one anothers abilities in arrangement competitions, and thus places like Dwelling of Duels were created.

So this got my brain juices flowing in my quest to remember what my very video game music remix was. (No small task, as my memory is shite.) Having scrolled through the plethora the old arrangements I’d saved over the course of almost a decade an a half of saved remixes, I settled on two that clicked the lightbulb in my brain. I’m not sure which one came first as I’d discovered them pretty much at the same time in 2000. Back then I’d stuck to the game music I’d been limited to as a kid, which was 90% Sega Genesis titles, which some Amiga, NES and Gameboy thrown in here and there for variety.

Castlevania being one of my most beloved game series back then (despite only owning 2 titles, and playing others elsewhere), I remember somehow traipsing across an arrangement from Castlevania The Adventure by Mike “McVaffe” Vafeas called “Tempest Mix“. Trance and techno music appealed to me heavily back in those days, and this arrangement of “Revenge” from Castlevania Adventure hit the spot for me. It had just enough of the source to grab me and keep my head bobbing for days. This is the same reason I’d come across the other arrangement I remember as being one of the two “firsts” I’d found. Golden Axe was another penultimate title for me as a kid, so “Death Adder Trance” by OCR founder David “djpretzel” Lloyd also hit the spot in terms of appealing to my love of Golden Axe’s music, in this case level 1’s “Wilderness”, and satisfying my fixation on dance-able music. For years I’d pop both of these tracks on from my burned CDs of remix music I’d accumulated and blast them in my beat-up Buick Century.

So what was your first video game music remix? It doesn’t have to be your favorite, but the first you remember listening to ever. Were you specifically looking for arrangements from a certain game? Where’d you find it? Let us know in the comments!

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